Online Safety Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 22nd June 2023 Lords Chamber

I say all this as someone who is regularly piled on. I noticed when I started to speak that the noble Baroness, Lady Stuart, is in her place. I remember my shock and horror when I saw the abuse she got some seven years ago and subsequently—really vicious, vile, horrible abuse for her political stance. Such abuse often takes a very sexualised form if you are a woman. So I can say from my lived experience that I know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of vile, horrible, misogynistic pile-ons, and so do Joanna Cherry, Rosie Duffield and a lot of people involved in contentious political issues. We need to make politics more civil by having the arguments and the debates and not mischaracterising, delegitimising or demonising people. I am just not sure that a criminal intervention here is going to help. I think it might make matters worse.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, said in introducing this group some time ago, it is very diverse. I shall comment on two aspects of the amendments in this group. I entirely associate myself with the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Allan, who really nailed the problems with Amendment 266, and I very much support the amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws; I would have signed them if I had caught up with them.

The noble Baroness, Lady Fox, talked about causing alarm and distress. I can draw on my own experience here, thinking about when someone randomly starts to post you pictures of crossbows. I think about what used to happen when I was a journalist in Bangkok, when various people used to get hand grenades posted into their letterbox. That was not actively dangerous—the pin was not pulled; it was still held down—but it was clearly a threat, and the same thing happens on social media.

This is something of which I have long experience. In 2005, when I was the founder of the feminist blog Carnival of Feminists, I saw the kinds of messages that the noble Baronesses have referred to, which in the days before social media used to be posted as comments on people’s blogs. You can still find the blog out there—it ran from 2005 to 2009—but many of its links to other blogs will be dead because they were often run by young women, often young women of colour, who were driven to pull down their blogs and sometimes were driven off the internet entirely by threatening, fearsome messages of the type that the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, referred to. We can argue about the drafting here—I will not have any opinion on that in detail—but something that addresses that issue is really important.

Secondly, we have not yet heard the Government’s introductions to Amendment 268AZA, but the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, provided us with the information that it is an amendment to create the offence of encouraging or assisting self-harm. I express support for the general tenor of that, but I want to make one specific point: so far as I can see, the amendment does not have any defence or carve-out for harm-reduction messages, which may be necessary.

To set the context here, figures from the Royal College of Psychiatrists say that about one in 10 young people self-harm at some stage in their youth, and the RCP says those figures are probably an underestimate because they are based on figures where medical professionals actually see them so the number is probably significantly higher than that. An article in the Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing from 2018 entitled “Self-cutting and harm reduction” is focused on in-patient settings, but the arguments in it are important in setting the general tone. It says that

“harm reduction in all its guises starts from the premise that the end goal”—

that is, to end self-harm entirely—

“is neither necessarily nor inevitably abstinence”,

which cannot be the solution for some people. Rather,

“the extinction of some particular form of behaviour may not be realistic for, or even desired by, the individual”.

So you may find messages that say, “If you are going to cut yourself, use a clean blade. If you do cut yourself, look after the wound afterwards”, but there is a risk that those kinds of well-intentioned, well-meaning and indeed expert messages could be caught by the amendment. I googled self-harm and harm reduction, and the websites that came up included Self Injury Support, which provides expert advice; a number of mental health trusts and healthcare trusts; and, indeed, the royal college’s own website.

The noble Lord, Lord Allan of Hallam, was trying to address this issue with Amendment 268AZC, which would allow the DPP to authorise prosecutions, but it seems to me that a better approach would be to have in the government amendment a statement saying, “We acknowledge that there will be cases where people talk about self-harm in ways that seek to minimise harm rather than simply stopping it, and they are not meant to be caught by this amendment”.

[Baroness Merron (Lab)]

My Lords, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, said, it seems a very long time since we heard the introduction from the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, but it was useful in setting this helpful and well-informed debate on its way. I am sure the whole Committee is keen to hear the Minister introducing the government amendments, even at this very late stage in the debate.

I would like to make reference to a few points. I was completely captivated by the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, who invoked the 10 commandments. I say to him that one can go to no higher order, which I am sure will support the amendments that he and his colleagues have put forward.

I will refer first to the amendments tabled by my noble friend Lady Kennedy. At a minimum, they are interesting because they try to broaden the scope of the current offences. I believe they also try to anticipate the extent of the impact of the government amendments, which in my view would be improved by my noble friend’s amendments. As my noble friend said, so many of the threats that are experienced online by, and directed towards, women and girls are indirect. They are about encouraging others: saying “Somebody should do something terrible to you” is extremely common. I feel that here is an opportunity to address that in the Bill, and if we do not, we will have missed a major aspect. I hope that the Minister will take account of that and be positive. We can all be relaxed about whether the amendments need to be made, but the intent is there.

That part of the debate made a strong case to build on the debate we had on an earlier day in Committee about violence against women and girls, which was led by the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, and supported by noble Baronesses and noble Lords from all sides of the House. We called upon the Minister then to ensure that the Bill explicitly includes the necessary amendments to make it refer to violence against women and girls because, for all the reasons that my noble friend Lady Kennedy has explained, it is considerably greater for them than for others. Without wishing to dismiss the fact that everybody receives levels of abuse, we have to be realistic here: I believe that my noble friend’s amendments are extremely helpful there.

This is a bit in anticipation of what the Minister will say—I am sure he will forgive me if he already has the answers. The noble Lords, Lord Clement-Jones and Lord Allan, referred particularly to the coalition of some 130 individuals and organisations which have expressed their concerns. I want to highlight those concerns as well, because they speak to some important points. The groups in that coalition include the largest self-harm charity, Self Injury Support, along with numerous smaller self-harm support organisations and, of course, the mental health charity Mind. Their voice is therefore considerable.

To emphasise what has already been outlined, the concern with the current amendments is that they are somewhat broad and equivalent to an offence of glamorising self-harm, which was rejected by the Law Commission in its consultation on the offence. That followed concern from the Magistrates’ Association and the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners that the offence would be ambiguous in application and complex to prosecute. It also risks criminalising people in distress, something that none of us want to see.

In addition, the broadness of the offence risks criminalising peer support and harm reduction resources, by defining them as capable of “encouraging or assisting” when they are in fact intended to help people who self-harm. This was raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, today and in respect of her Private Member’s Bill, which we debated very recently in this Chamber, and I am sure that it would not be the Minister’s intention.

I would like to emphasise another point that has been made. The offence may also criminalise content posted by people who are in distress and sharing their own experiences of self-harm—the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, referred to this—by, for example, posting pictures of wounds. We do not want to subject vulnerable people to litigation, so let us not have an offence which ends up harming the very people it aims to protect. I shall be listening closely to the Minister.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Allan. He reminded me of significant reports of the huge amount of exploitation in the digital sector that has come from identification of photos. A great deal of that is human labour, even though it is often claimed to have been done through machine intelligence.

In speaking to this late but important amendment, I thank the noble Lords, Lord Stevenson and Lord Knight, for giving us the chance to do so, because, as every speaker has said, this is really important. I should declare my position as a former newspaper editor. I distinctly recall teasing a sports journalist in the early 1990s when it was reported that journalists were going to be replaced by computer technology. I said that the sports journalists would be the first to go because they just wrote to a formula anyway. I apologise to sports journalists everywhere.

The serious point behind that is that a lot of extreme, high claims are now being made about so-called artificial intelligence. I declare myself an artificial-intelligence sceptic. What we have now—so-called generative AI—is essentially big data. To quote the science fiction writer, Ted Chiang, what we have is applied statistics. Generative AI relies on looking at what already exists, and it cannot produce anything original. In many respects, it is a giant plagiarism machine. There are huge issues, beyond the scope of the Bill, around intellectual property and the fact that it is not generating anything original.

None the less, it is generating what people in the sector like to describe as hallucinations, which might otherwise be described as errors, falsehoods or lies. This is where quotes are made up; ideas are presented which, at first glance, look as though they make sense but fall apart under examination; and data is actively invented. There is one rather famous case where a lawyer got himself into a great deal of trouble by producing a whole lot of entirely false cases that a bot generated for him. We need to be really careful, and this amendment shows us a way forward in attempting to deal with some of the issues we are facing.

To pick up the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Allan, about the real-world impacts, I was at an event in Parliament this week entitled “The Worker Experience of the AI Revolution”, run by the TUC and Connected by Data. It highlighted what has happened with a lot of the big data exercises already in operation: rather than humans being replaced by robots, people are being forced to act like robots. We heard from Royal Mail and Amazon workers, who are monitored closely and expected to act like machines. That is just one example of the unexpected outcomes of the technologies we have been exercising in recent years.

I will make two final comments. First, I refer to 19th-century Luddite John Booth, who was tortured to death by the state. He was a Luddite, but he was also on the record as saying that new machinery

“might be man’s chief blessing instead of his curse if society were differently constituted”.

History is not pre-written; it is made by the choices, laws and decisions we make in this Parliament. Given where we are at the moment with so-called AI, I urge that caution really is warranted. We should think about putting some caution in the Bill, which is what this amendment points us towards.

My final point relates to an amendment I was not allowed to table because, I was told, it was out of scope. It asked the Secretary of State to report on the climate emissions coming from the digital sector, specifically from artificial intelligence. The noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, said that it will operate on a vast scale. I point out that, already, the digital sector is responsible for 3% of the world’s electricity use and 2% of the world’s carbon emissions, which is about the same as the airline sector. We really need to think about caution. I very much agree with everyone who said that we need to have more discussions on all these issues before Report.

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, this is a real hit-and-run operation from the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson. He has put down an amendment on my favourite subject in the last knockings of the Bill. It is totally impossible to deal with this now—I have been thinking and talking about the whole area of AI governance and ethics for the past seven years—so I am not going to try. It is important, and the advisory committee under Clause 139 should take it into account. Actually, this is much more a question of authenticity and verification than of content. Trying to work out whether something is ChatGPT or GPT-4 content is a hopeless task; you are much more likely to be able to identify whether these are automated users such as chatbots than you are to know about the content itself.

I will leave it there. I missed the future-proofing debate, which I would have loved to have been part of. I look forward to further debates with the noble Viscount, Lord Camrose, on the deficiencies in the White Paper and to the Prime Minister’s much more muscular approach to AI regulation in future.